We've now harvested the majority of our apples - and I've already dehydrated five large bags of them. They taste yummy dried - with nothing added.

And like our pears, our apples are huge this year. We have a few apples that weigh more than a pound each! It sort of makes a mockery of the "apple a day keeps the doctor away" as one of our apples could feed a family of four!

In fact, it did for lunch today. I made a nice slaw with a single large apple, walnuts, spring onion and mint. And it fed four of us nicely!

Not quite sure what has happened with our orchard fruit this year. We've never seen it so large - with pears over a pound each, apples the same and even large nectarines! Yet not a great year for tomatoes.

But no complaints! We are loving it. What are you enjoying this early September?

July Harvest

I bought my husband a new collapsible bucket this week. I know - how romantic can I get? I was really tempted with the lime green one - but that is my favorite color, so I got him the blue one - as that's his favorite color! Only seemed right!!

The reason for the purchase - (in addition to my loving him :-D) - was that we do a lot of harvesting of fruits and veggies in our garden, and we have big things to collect fruit in but not really anything nice for smaller harvests. So if we are picking a whole tree of apples, that's fine - or 12 trees of olives or loads of grapes...no problem but just a few items tended to go in a horrid old red bucket. But no longer!

The new collapsible blue bucket now comes to the rescue and it got its first use this week! And it did a fine job.

We put in some:kalepadrone peppers - these are my 2013 new favorite foodgreen figsblack figspeaches andapricots

What a colorful harvest.

I'm so happy to have an early fig harvest this year. Some years we only get them in the fall but we've had quite a few July figs this year and it looks like an amazing number will ripen for the fall. We will definitely be figged out! Glad family will be staying with us to help us out.